Hyrule Warriors is a hack and slash beat’em up. This Zelda game breaks away from the Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess model, it is not even a return to the classic SNES or Gameboy versions. It is a collaboration from Nintendo and Tecmo Koei the creators of the Dynasty Warriors series. The two companies put characters from the popular Legend of Zelda series in a Dynasty Warriors style of game and it worked way better than expected. There are 13 characters to unlock and each has their own special attacks. Each does mostly the same thing in different ways. The story has 18 different levels and each look and play a lot different even though you are doing the same thing.

The story is strong but that has a lot to do with Zelda and Link. One of the things we don’t like about the Dynasty Warriors games is we kind of did not care about who is doing what. Hyrule Warriors however has the opposite effect. When it flashes across the screen that “Links position is under attack” or “escort Zelda to the fountain” you have a love for these Nintendo icons and want to run over and help them. The controls are real sharp in their response and the camera is easy to adjust but it does not self-adjust very well. There are dozens of mini-boss and major boss battle all over the battlefields and many of them are optional. You will want to take them all on because they give you special items you can use to unlock and upgrade weapons, armor and stats.

There is also an adventure mode as part of the game. It is a group of challenge maps with certain conditions for victory that will help you unlock the final playable characters and the strongest weapons in the game. You will need the weapons if you are going to take on the main story in harder challenge levels. There are 128 challenges and for you classic Legend of Zelda fans you will notice that after you defeat a section it uncovers a section of a map that is from the 1986 The Legend of Zelda game and yes that is awesome. Each challenge map does not take very long but you can take your time in some of them and take over areas that you don’t need to just for the fun of it. There are also secrets to unlock in some of the maps. It is a little repetitive but we never got bored. Even little things like the overhead battle map, the Dynasty Warriors storytelling narration and music were all enjoyable.

The game is missing voice talent. It is time that one of the classic Nintendo exclusive series gets a voice and Link and Zelda are the best candidates. We understand not giving a real voice to Donkey Kong and Mario but with storylines in the world of Hyrule are deeper. It is time to hear what Zelda has to say about her kingdom. Also during combat it is hard to read what is going. You are trying to plan a strategy, watch what areas your foes are attacking and trying to read messages all at the same time. Sometimes it does not work. This is more of a reason to have voice talent instead of reading info as it comes in. Hyrule Warriors took us a between 12 and 15 hours to complete. But, when you add in adventure mode your total game time could be 40 hours plus. Replay is pretty high, because after you unlock new characters you will want to try them out in battle and then there is co-op and multiplayer adding more time with Hyrule Warriors. It is worth paying $50 dollars or less for. We like the story, it did get a little repetitive and it really needs some voice talent but we had fun.